Lucas Silva smiles again playing football, an image that could hardly be seen in Spain and practically during his time in Europe; back in his native country, Silva feels like a footballer again. The Spanish fans will remember the Brazilian for his brief stint at Real Madrid, where he arrived in January 2015, precisely at a time when the white team was in the hands of Carlo Ancelotti, their current coach. It cost Madrid 15 million euros to get him out of the Cruzeiro.
It was a signing recommended by Juni Calafat, the head of international recruitment of the white club, who is also responsible for the signings of Rodrygo, Vinicius or Reinier. However, it did not work: he barely played 424 minutes in nine games that season, eight in the League and one in the Champions League. Ancelotti’s confidence in him was so low that in the semi-finals of the Champions League, against Juventus, he preferred to overtake Sergio Ramos to midfield (with debatable results) rather than line him up at the start.
The operation was a failure: in 2015-16 Rafael Benítez did not want him on the squad and was loaned to Marseille, where he played 33 games under the command of the Spanish Míchel. When a new transfer to Sporting de Portugal was already in sight, heart problems were detected that stopped everything and that almost forced him to leave football. In 2019, a year before ending his contract, he reached an agreement with Madrid to terminate the relationship that united them: to the white club, each game they played in Madrid cost 2.1 million euros.
The arrhythmia detected finally came to nothing, despite the fact that at times they let Silva know that he would not be able to play at the elite level again, and in January 2017 he returned on loan to Cruzeiro, where he played two and a half seasons. When he terminated his contract with Madrid, he was unemployed for more than a year (Cruzeiro did not want to sign him for free), until Gremio, his current home, appeared, where he is shining again.
In 2020 he played 2,700 minutes in 48 games; and in 2021 he has more than 2,400 in 44 games, shining especially in the last two days of the Brasileirao: He scored a goal against Red Bull Bragantino and then scored another goal and gave an assist against Chapecoense. At 28 years old, he is no longer the inexperienced kid who played for Real Madrid became too big for him; Lucas Silva returns to perform in Brazil, where he caught the attention of the white club at first.
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The rebirth of Lucas Silva